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For many people, childhood is the time we are most saturated with poetry, and young adulthood is when we are first compelled to write it. Matthea Harvey and Marilyn Nelson, leading poets and writers for children and young adults respectively, discuss how their poetic practices include and are influenced by their writing for young people.

“One of the most influential poetry critics of his generation,” according to The New York Times, Harvard professor Stephen Burt has published three collections of poetry in addition to his many critical works. In this program, he’ll discuss "the paradoxical, conflicting role of the poet-critic or how to read your own work as if you didn't write it" – a useful skill for poets and writers of all kinds.

Can poetry function as closet drama, occurring offstage? At turns text, event, and chorus? In this three-day seminar and workshop, we'll move in successive forms -- from a close-read of Ingeborg Bachmann’s radio drama, “The Good God of Manhattan” (1958) alongside selections from her poetry, into the film and performance scripts of Kathy Acker, and finally to notes on her own work by Marguerite Duras, whose devotion to sound and disrupted linearity is basically a staging of poetic thinking.

In this interactive program, Britain-based poetry critic Daniel Swift, editor of The Heart is Strange: New Selected Poems as well as forthcoming centennial editions of Berryman’s work, will discuss the relationship between the biography of the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of The Dream Songs and the ways in which the life of this confessional poet might influence – or confuse – critical understandings of his works.

The author of Faces in the Crowd and Sidewalks, novelist and essayist Valeria Luiselli uses the city to exercise a roving intelligence, seeking out the questions imbedded in our human landscape. She'll discuss her month-long residency in the Poets House archives and the influence of poetry, architecture and archives on her work. Luiselli will be joined by Shannon Mattern, an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School.

Our earliest writers combined forms naturally: Herodotus wrote stories about what he saw or heard and called it history; Sappho wrote songs we call poetry. In this talk, Eleni Sikelianos, poet and memoirist, whose newest book is the mixed-genre You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek), discusses how she and other writers are reviving the flow of genetic material between forms to reflect our complicated minds and lives.